AllThingsD » Kindle 2

Nook E-Reader Has Potential, but Needs Work

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 02:03:50 +0000

Amazon’s Kindle has been the king of the nascent, much-hyped, category of wireless e-readers since it came out in 2007. Now, numerous companies are determined to challenge the Kindle with dedicated, mass-market gadgets for reading digital books and periodicals. The latest, and potentially most important, of these is a contender called the Nook, produced by the giant bookstore chain Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS), which started shipping it this week.

The two devices look very similar, but have key differences in capabilities, user interface and polish. Overall, after testing the Nook for about a week, I don’t think it’s as good as the Kindle, at least not yet. At launch, the Nook has the feel of a product with great potential that was rushed to market before it was fully ready.

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Like the latest standard-size Kindle, which came out earlier this year, the Nook is a roughly 8-inch by 5-inch, ivory-colored plastic tablet that costs $259 and connects wirelessly to an online store. The two devices have essentially identical reading screens, 6 inches when measured diagonally, that allow for only monochrome text and gray-scale graphics, not color. Both come with two gigabytes of internal memory, enough to hold about 1,500 digital books.

Nook’s most obvious difference from Kindle is that it also boasts a second, smaller color screen beneath the main reading screen. This touch screen is used for navigating and for typing via an on-screen keyboard when performing searches or adding notes to books. Also, when the touch screen is dark, it can be swiped to turn pages instead of using the physical page-turning buttons at the sides of the main screen.

The competing Kindle (formerly called the Kindle 2, but now back to just Kindle) uses a joystick, Menu and Home buttons, and pop-up menus on the main screen for navigating. It has a physical keyboard below the screen for typing and can turn pages only using physical buttons.

A customer tries a Nook e-reader at a Barnes Noble store in Manhattan on Monday.

Also, unlike the Kindle, the Nook lets you lend certain digital books to others for a limited period, an innovation that removes one of the most common complaints about buying books electronically instead of on paper.

Another big difference: Nook claims a catalog of just over one million digital books, versus 389,000 for the Kindle. But this is somewhat misleading, because over half of the Nook catalog is made up of free out-of-copyright titles published before 1923, the vast majority of which are likely to be of little interest to average readers. Barnes & Noble refuses to say how many modern commercial titles it offers, or even whether it has more or fewer of these than Amazon (AMZN).

Amazon says it already has nearly 20,000 of the most popular such older books available and plans to add hundreds of thousands more in the coming months, to bring its total selection to more than one million.

Amazon also offers well over 100 newspapers and magazines and 7,500 blogs. Barnes & Noble says it will have about 45 periodicals in the coming weeks, but no blogs.

The Nook has a small color screen for navigating and typing notes.

Both devices offer downloads of most best-sellers, but in a random, unscientific test I performed using print books from around my house, I found Amazon’s commercial e-book catalog superior. Barnes & Noble lacked digital versions of two recent historical biographies I own, and had no digital editions of the works of one of my favorite contemporary mystery writers, Donna Leon. Amazon had all these books in Kindle editions. Barnes & Noble says titles like these are being added.

During my tests, I found the Nook slower, more cumbersome to use and less polished than the Kindle. I ran into various crashes and bugs. And, while the Kindle’s navigation system isn’t exactly world class, it ran circles around the Nook’s, despite the great possibilities offered by the latter’s use of the touch screen.

The Nook may be wonderful one day, but, as of today, it’s no match for the Kindle, despite advantages such as lending, because it’s more annoying to use.

For instance, the Nook constantly delayed taking me to books while the main screen displayed a message that said “formatting.” Its standard practice is to open books you select not at the actual start of the book, but at a description of the book. Turning pages inside books was slower than on the Kindle. Looking up a word in the built-in dictionary, a quick process on the Kindle, was far harder on the Nook. Even swiping the touch screen to turn pages would suddenly stop working for periods of time.

The good news for those who have ordered a Nook, which is currently sold out, is that its software can be updated, and Barnes & Noble is promising to fix the problems, starting with a wirelessly delivered patch next week that it says will improve the speed a bit, get you closer to the start of the book, and repair some of the bugs.

Two things are worth noting here. First, I also criticized the design of the original Kindle and the original Sony (SNE) e-reader, both of which have improved in subsequent iterations. (Sony, which was in this market early, is promising to release its first wireless e-reader later this month.)

Second, the entire e-reader market is still in its infancy. The lack of color in books and periodicals alone is a huge drawback. One day, I suspect both of these products will look like a 1996 Palm (PALM) PDA does compared with an Apple (AAPL) iPhone.

The Nook is a bit shorter and narrower than the Kindle, but it is an ounce heavier and significantly thicker. It has a cleaner look, because the bezel around the screen is narrower and there is no physical keyboard. The touch screen adds a dash of color, though it often goes dark to save battery life.

Like the Kindle, the Nook has built-in cellular connectivity with no monthly charges. But it also adds Wi-Fi, which is free at Barnes & Noble stores, though mostly unusable at other commercial hotspots, because the Nook lacks a Web browser that would allow you to log in. The Kindle has a crude Web browser, but no Wi-Fi.

Speaking of battery life, the Nook’s is worse than the Kindle’s. It claims about 10 days of typical use with wireless off, and just two days with wireless on. In my week of tests, with wireless on constantly, I had to charge it three times. Amazon rates the Kindle at 14 days of typical use with wireless off and seven days with wireless on, which squares with my own Kindle experience.

The Nook beats the Kindle in a few areas. Lending is a key one, though only about half of the commercial titles are eligible for lending, you can lend each one only once to a given person, and loans expire after two weeks. In my tests, lending worked OK after a couple of false starts.

Another is that Barnes & Noble takes advantage of its stores. In addition to getting free Wi-Fi, Nook owners who enter a Barnes & Noble store can read books on their Nooks for free, and get help from staff members.

Unlike the Kindle, the Nook also has a slot for expandable memory cards and a replaceable battery. Barnes & Noble also has companion PC, Mac, iPhone and BlackBerry software for reading e-books, even if you don’t own a Nook. Amazon has such software, so far, only for the iPhone and PC.

But, while Amazon will synchronize your last page read if you switch from reading a book on one device to using another, Barnes & Noble lacks that capability yet, though it says it will have it soon.

One more thing: The latest standard-size Kindle allows wireless book purchasing in multiple countries. The Nook does so only in the U.S.

My recommendation on the Nook is to wait, even if you prefer its features to the Kindle’s. It’s not fully baked yet.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

The Book That Contains All Books

Stephen Marche — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 12:00:32 +0000

On Monday, the Kindle 2 will become the first e-reader available globally. The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text. The question is how. And the answer can be found in the history of earlier book forms.

Most literate people are familiar with at least some of the consequences of the print revolution of the 15th century, but far fewer are as aware of the much more profound change that occurred when rolls were replaced by codices–pages bound between covers–in the late Roman period.

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Sony's New Reader, Plus Free Library Books, Passes My "Dad Test." Is That Enough?

Peter Kafka — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:22:58 +0000

Sony started selling e-book readers long before Amazon, but blew its lead. So how can it catch up with its new device, which looks and works much like the Kindle, but costs $100 more?

After Sony unveiled its new line of readers this morning, I posed that question to Sony executive Steve Haber, who immediately pointed out that his “Daily Edition” machine has a slightly bigger screen than the Kindle 2 and boasts a touchscreen. (You can check out my interview with him at the bottom of this post.)

Both of these sound like nice upgrades from Amazon’s (AMZN) machine–I can’t actually tell you if they are since Sony (SNE) was simply showing the device today without actually demoing it. But I don’t think they’re enough to convince someone to shell out another $100.

But Sony does have one feature that sounds much more interesting–at least on electronic paper (Heh-heh. Get it?). The device will let you check out books, for free, from your local library.

In theory, Sony’s library program will work the way conventional books work now: Participating libraries purchase a given number of electronic copies of a particular book and lend them out, one at a time. The books will disappear at the end of the lending period, which will cut down on flexibility, but will also eliminate late fees.

We’ll see how this works in practice. The most obvious hurdle is convincing enough libraries to buy enough books to satisfy e-book owners who expect to be able to check out whatever they like, whenever they like.

But! If Sony can arrange this, it will convince people like my dad, who likes technology and hates spending money. We’ve talked about e-books for years and his line has always been the same: He’s a big reader who’s not attached to the idea of ink-and-paper books, and he’s happy to shell out a couple hundred bucks for a reading device. But he hates the idea of paying for books he’ll only read once.

So let’s assume that Sony and the libraries it is working with can deliver on the promising concept. Dad’s in. Are there enough of him to help Sony catch up?

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The New Yorker Reviews the Kindle: "Buy an iPod Touch"

Peter Kafka — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:14:02 +0000

Novelist Nicholson Baker, whose first book was about a man riding an escalator, and who spends a lot of time thinking and writing about the future of reading, tackles the Kindle in this week’s New Yorker. He devotes 6,219 words to the subject, and if you’ve got the time (it’s summer!), they’re worth reading.

If you’re in a rush, the takeaway is that he’s not very impressed with Amazon’s (AMZN) device, and that all things being equal, he thinks Apple’s e-reader is at least as good. He’s not talking about the yet-to-appear iTablet, of course. Like a lot of other people, he’s fond of Apple’s (AAPL) current iPhone/iPod touch line:

Amazon, with its listmania lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things. But, fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch (it costs seventy dollars less than the Kindle 2, even after the Kindle’s price was recently cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free “Kindle for iPod” application onto it.

Oddly, Baker doesn’t make a reference to Kindlegate, even though the story broke a couple of weeks ago. If you’re looking for a summary of where things stand on that one and have five minutes to spare, you can listen in to the chat I had with NPR’s “On the Media,” which aired over the weekend. You can hear the full show here.

One last note: I’m stepping out for a couple weeks and going semi-off the grid, so if all goes well you won’t be hearing from me till the second week of August. If all goes really well, I may even read an ink-and-paper book. Meantime there will be plenty of fresh new stuff from Walt, Kara, John and Katie over at the mothership. See you soonish.

The Latest Kindle: Bigger, Not Better, Than Its Sibling

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 01:04:03 +0000

There’s a brand-new variant of the Amazon Kindle e-reader, and it’s available from the online bookseller starting this week.

This alternative Kindle, called the DX, is a super-size version of the popular Kindle 2, which arrived earlier this year. It sports a 9.7-inch screen, some 2.5 times as big as the surface area of the Kindle 2′s 6-inch display. It also sports a higher price tag — $489, versus $359 for its smaller sibling, which remains on the market.

Amazon’s Kindle DX

Like previous models, the Kindle DX allows you to shop for, and wirelessly download, any e-book in Amazon’s (AMZN) growing catalog — now about 275,000 titles. It uses the same easy-on-the-eyes screen technology as the smaller model but at a higher resolution. It still lacks color, and renders images only in gray scale. But the new DX adds a new capability: auto-rotation, which allows you to read in landscape mode.

This new, larger model isn’t primarily aimed at readers of standard books. It is targeted at three markets: textbooks, newspapers and other periodicals, and business documents in either Microsoft’s (MSFT) Word format or Adobe’s (ADBE) PDF format.

Unfortunately, I’ve been testing the Kindle DX and I didn’t like it nearly as much as the Kindle 2, which I own and enjoy using daily. While it performs its promised tasks adequately, I found that its size and weight made it awkward and tiring to hold for long periods of reading. It’s still fairly thin and light, but it’s 85% larger and heavier than the standard Kindle.

In addition, Amazon has degraded the user interface. To prevent the device from being even larger, the company had to remove the left-side page-turning buttons, confining all the controls to a vertical strip on the right. The keyboard at the bottom is also more vertically cramped.

If you’re left-handed, you have to spin the device around and rotate the screen to get buttons on the left, where they appear with their labels upside-down.

Similarly, if you choose to read in landscape mode, all the navigation controls, including the joystick for moving the cursor, will be awkwardly placed at either the top or bottom, far from where your hands are holding the device, and the keyboard essentially will be unusable.

In my view, the Kindle DX would have been a better product with on-screen touch controls that could instantly adapt to its size and orientation.

In reading standard books on the DX, I also encountered instances where the text on a page varied in shade from light gray to black.

I had mixed results with business documents. As with previous Kindles, you can either email personal documents to your device, for a fee, or drag them onto the Kindle via a cable, for free. But, unlike the smaller models, the new DX has PDF display capability built in, so it renders PDF files much more accurately than the older Kindles. That is a big improvement. It also allows you to view Excel and PowerPoint files if you save them in PDF format before sending them to your Kindle DX.

The Kindle DX, right, is a large-screen version of the popular Kindle e-reader, left.

I tried a variety of documents, and in many cases the results were great. The text was crisp, and the tables and graphics looked like they should. But I found that on some of these PDF documents, the text was too small to read. Yet, the Kindle lacks the ability to zoom in on PDF documents. You often can make the type larger by rotating to landscape mode, but this splits the PDFs into multiple pages, sometimes breaking them awkwardly.

Also, Amazon has raised its fees for converting and delivering business documents via email to all Kindles. The charge was formerly 10 cents a document. Now, it’s 15 cents per megabyte, which can add up if you load up your Kindle with lots of large documents. Most of my test documents, which were fairly small, cost over $1 each.

Newspapers looked about the same on the DX as they do on the smaller Kindles. Despite the larger screen, they don’t use traditional print or Web layouts, but a special Kindle layout that some users like a lot, but which I find annoying because it makes it harder to quickly scan multiple headlines.

The Kindle DX does have some nice touches. For the extra money, you not only get a larger screen, but also about twice the storage capacity. Also, because the screen is wider, you can adjust the margins on the DX, to obtain a line length that’s comfortable for your eyes and optimal for reading speed.

Amazon claims the same multiday battery life for the DX as for the Kindle 2. In my tests, I was able to go for several days of moderate reading without recharging, and much more if I turned off the wireless capability.

Although I wasn’t able to test college textbooks, I suspect they may be the killer app for this product. Many already are so expensive and heavy they could make the weight and price of the Kindle DX seem trivial in comparison.

But for standard books, I’d stick with the smaller, more comfortable Kindle 2.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

First Impressions of Kindle on iPhone

Walt Mossberg — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:02:37 +0000

As I predicted in my review of Amazon.com’s Kindle 2 e-book reader last week, the giant bookseller has moved quickly to make the 240,000 book Kindle catalog available on other devices. On Tuesday night, the first Kindle software reader appeared, and it’s a free iPhone app. Called Kindle for iPhone, the app replicates the basic book-reading functions of the hardware Kindle device, and can be thought of as a complement to that device, which has more features. However, you don’t have to own a hardware Kindle to use this app. You can now choose instead to use your iPhone or iPod Touch as the reader for books from Kindle’s catalog.

I tried the new iPhone Kindle app moments after it became available on Apple’s App Store (AAPL), and my first impression is generally positive. But first, let me note the key features of the hardware Kindle that aren’t carried over to the iPhone app. It doesn’t support periodicals. It doesn’t read books aloud. It doesn’t allow you to enter notes or highlight text, look up words in a dictionary, or perform searches.

And, if you wish to purchase a new e-book, the Kindle app sends you over to the iPhone’s Safari Web browser to go the Amazon (AMZN) Web site; it lacks a built-in Kindle store.

However, it is a solid basic app for reading books, and is especially valuable if you already own a hardware Kindle, as I do. In my brief tests, the iPhone app synchronized rapidly and perfectly with my purchased library of Kindle books on Amazon’s servers, and allowed me to retrieve a previously purchased e-book, without paying again, just as my hardware Kindle does. It also synchronized to the furthest page I had read in that book on my Kindle. After reading for awhile on the iPhone, I performed that process in reverse, and my Kindle took me to the same spot where I had quit reading on the iPhone.

This means that, if I were in line at the grocery store with my iPhone, I could read a few pages of my book, and then, when I picked up my Kindle at home, I could continue reading, starting from the same spot.

I also was able to buy a new book using the iPhone’s Web bowser, and Amazon gave me a choice of auto-delivering it to either my Kindle or my iPhone, which it treats as just another Kindle. I did so, and it appeared very quickly. I later downloaded it as well to my Kindle.

Reading on the device was easy. You turn pages using the iPhone’s horizontal swiping gesture, and you can change the font size on the fly, and create bookmarks, which then can be synced back to a Kindle device. You can view any notes you made on a hardware Kindle. And there’s a slider to quickly go back and forth through chunks of the book.

The only flaw I encountered in my brief testing: if you turn pages too fast you get a fleeting blank page or two.

In two key respects, using the iPhone app seems superior to using a Kindle. First, the iPhone’s screen is brighter, and supports color, so book covers and illustrations in my test books looked much better on the iPhone than they did on the Kindle. Second, the iPhone is smaller and thus much more portable.

The new Kindle app isn’t as full-featured as some other e-reader apps for the iPhone, which do allow annotation, searching, and so forth. But it gets the job done and it gives you access to Amazon’s large catalog, which contains more popular and current commercial titles than other e-book sellers offer.

If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch owner who has yearned for a Kindle but balked at its $359 price, or a Kindle owner with an iPhone or Touch already, this new Kindle app is a good bet, even if it is bare-bones.

Novatel: JMP Advises Getting Out; Kindle Is Not Enough

Eric Savitz — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 20:15:20 +0000

Novatel (NVTL) shares are down hard this morning after JMP Securities analyst Samuel Wilson downgraded the stock to Market Underperform from Market Perform.

For the year through yesterday, Novatel shares had rallied 34.7 percent; Wilson notes that the wireless networking equipment company has gotten a boost from its role providing components to the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle 2 e-book reader. But Wilson says the Kindle 2 will contribute at most $10 million a quarter to Novatel’s revenue, “not enough to fill the hole left by the drop in demand in the PC and USB adapter business.” Novatel declined to talk about the Kindle on its post-earnings conference call last night, but did say that Foxconn, which manufactures the Kindle, was a 10 percent customer in Q4.

After the close yesterday, Novatel reported Q4 revenue of $65.1 million, slightly above the Street at $64.9 million, but down from $118 million a year ago. The company posted a non-GAAP loss of six cents a share, a penny worse than expected.

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Re-Kindled

John Paczkowski — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 21:37:26 +0000

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